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The African-American Literary Tradition

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The African-American Literary Tradition LINGUACULTURE, 2, 2012 CREATING THE NORM: THE AFRICAN-AMERICAN LITERARY TRADITION OANA COGEANU Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iaşi Abstract This paper starts from the premise that norm, in the sense of a prescriptive tradition based on a set of standards deriving from past practices and regulating future ones, is the result of an initial creative gesture; in other words, first there was creativity and creativity became the norm. Based on this premise, the paper looks at some of the earliest African-American pieces of writing to trace the itinerary from creativity to norm, thus witnessing the birth of the African-American literary tradition. To this end, the paper analyses the first published Black narrative and identifies the trope of the talking book as illustrating that original gesture which, by creatively incorporating the norm, marks the beginning of a new tradition. Then the paper follows subsequent early Black narratives and identifies the creative transgression of the norm illustrated by the Middle Passage as the process by which the new norm is established. Keywords: norm, creativity, African-American, literature, talking book, Middle Passage 1. A creative gesture Readers of early African-American writing cannot fail to notice that the establishment of the African-American literary tradition brings forth a peculiar connection between writing and travel. Within the boundaries of travel, like within those of writing, one finds both enslavement and freedom; then it is not fortuitous that the black subject first discovers the book as a metonymic expression of Westcentric discourse upon an actual, albeit enforced, journey. The earliest published black (travel) account, A narrative of the most remarkable particulars in the life of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, an African Prince (1774), first reports of this revelation, as well as of the slave’s anxiety before it, in what scholars such as Henry Louis Gates Jr., Homi K. Bhabha and Anthony Appiah have called the trope of the talking book: DOI: 10.1515/lincu -2015-0002 24 Oana COGEANU “[My Master] used to read prayers in public to the ship’s crew every Sabbath day; and when first I saw him read, I was never so surprised in my whole life as when I saw the book talk to my master; for I thought it did, as I observed him to look upon it, and move his lips. I wished it would do so to me.” (Gronniosaw, 16) The talking book is a sign of multilayered significance and rampant irony. Among others, it illustrates the dialectic relation between (white) norm and (black) creativity. Written as it is in the name of the F/father, the text to which the former African prince, now a slave, listens in wonder is a religious text supporting an economic mission – a holy paradox of Westcentric discourse. The book fails to convey its contained message of prayer, that is, the content of the norm, but to the innocent listener it does communicate the “immediate vision of the thing, freed from the discourse that accompanied it, or even encumbered it” (Bhabha, 29). That is, the book signifies the Word in itself and thereby signifies signification in the making, communicating norm as form. And what is norm but formalised content, i.e. substance as form? Ironically, the initial refusal of the grand text of Western discourse to speak to the person of African descent is reported in a text written by the latter. This means that, at some point, the norm was internalised in both its form and content and is now being conveyed, albeit in antithetical disguise. The talking book thus tells of a mutual conquest: not only did the book eventually talk to the African prince, but it lent him a voice, first turning him into an interlocutor and then affording him access to self-locution. The talking book becomes a spoken book when its normative content as a master narrative surrenders to its creative reading as a leitmotif in Gronniosaw’s narrative. Indeed, so compelling was the trope of the talking book and its underlying quest for literacy and freedom that the five earliest African- American narratives by James Gronniosaw, John Marrant, Olaudah Equiano, Ottabah Cugoano and John Jea all draw upon the discovery of the English book in a similar scenario of travel played out in the wilderness of colonial India, Africa or the Caribbean. The talking book in the sense of “signs taken for wonders” (Bhabha, 29) becomes the leading metaphor of the slave’s progress to literacy and, ultimately, to authorship. Scholars agree that, in a very literal sense, the African-American literary tradition was created with the clear purpose of demonstrating that people of African descent possessed the required degree of reason and wit not only to write, but also to create literature, which serves, however redundant, as a certificate of humanity; hence the act of writing constitutes the first African-American political gesture (Bhabha, 12): “text created author; and black authors, it was hoped, CREATING THE NORM: THE AFRICAN-AMERICAN TRADITION 25 would create, or re-create, the image of the race in European discourse” (Appiah, 11). The talking book thus illustrates the progress of African- American creativity, which is set against the background of the white norm, and is to acquire a self-normative function, that is, to establish and consecrate a specific African-American tradition. 2. A norm is born The quest for freedom and literacy as illustrated by the trope of the talking book remains strongly connected to the theme of travel and often takes the form of travel writing throughout the development of the African-American tradition. When it comes to African-American travel writing, scholars agree that, since the concept of travel entails a condition of intentionality, African- American travel excludes the enforced mobility of the Middle Passage. Nevertheless, it is the Middle Passage that functions as the permanent, explicit or implicit, hypotext of African-American travel (and) writing; it offers the experiential source and the imaginary theme of subsequent African-American mobility. In fact, the Middle Passage not only constitutes the original site of the African-American tradition, but also provides an illustration of its inner workings. James Campbell argued that, in discussing the Middle Passage, the focus should shift from the image of the tightly packed ship to another image, as proposed by Harris, of the limbo dance of slaves brought up on the deck (Campbell, 7). In fact, one should note that the two images offered by this original experience are complementary: the Middle Passage does not signify, disjunctively, either the paradox of an immobilized displacement, or, through those moments when African captives replicate their physical contortions in dance, the creation of an alternative, aesthetic space for expression; it signifies both the hold and the deck, displacement and repositioning, and thus provides the dynamic locus where African-American culture originates. Hence, the Middle Passage proposes both an experience and its cathartic re-presentation, an aesthetic beginning originating in an existential end, the oppressions of the norm and the liberation of transgression. It is an act of mobile creativity against the stasis of norm. Moreover, the first transatlantic journey, suggests James Campbell as well, emerges not as a clean break between past and present, but as a spatial continuum between Africa and America, the ship’s deck and the hold (Campbell, 8). Actually, it is not so much continuity as suspension that the Middle Passage proposes: the slaves on the ship are neither in Africa, nor in America; they are suspended in the limitlessness of the ocean, in a space in- between. The Middle Passage rejects the opposition between hold and deck, above and below, constriction and movement, proposing a space in-between, in the sense conceptualized by Homi K. Bhabha in The Location of Culture 26 Oana COGEANU or by Paul Gilroy in The Black Atlantic . It is this transgressive space that accommodates the first African-American aesthetic expression and therefore comes to serve as the original site of African-American creativity and the measuring rod of subsequent African-American production. 3. Norm as creativity As such, early travel narratives illustrate the way in which, in a transgressive fashion, black travellers position themselves freely within the space of geography, the conventions of literature and the societal norms of the time. Contrary to the representational stereotype of the black slave in chains, one should emphasize, as Gerzina (2001) does, the intense travel of black sailors who, until the Civil War, played a central role in the formation of the African-Americans’ collective sense of self, being central to the very creation of black America (Bolster,,2). The ocean as mobile home, the contradictory space which bears the commercial marks of both servitude and freedom, comes to signify in early African-American travel narratives an itinerary of economic and religious conversion leading to the first affirmation of an African-American identity, whereas the Christian black seaman emerges as the earliest normative image of the enslaved yet free African-American. These early, mostly African-born writers attempt to reconcile their enslavement with the freedom afforded by a Christianity that was instrumental in that enslavement. Moreover, since the Middle Passage as passed down in the tradition of African-American travel (and) writing denotes severance from the African home, the first reflex of the African- American traveler prompts a return to Africa in order to re-establish a home of memory or imagination. Probably the most prominent of the early African-American travel writers, Olaudah Equiano provides in The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa, the African (1789) an account of travels in which the economic search for independence is paralleled by a religious quest.
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